For my project, I did not travel the world. In fact, I spent most of my time secluded amidst the towering bookshelves of Van Pelt, meticulously and methodically sifting through various similar search terms before I came across those key words that would find me the article that I had been looking for all along. During the evenings, when the library would close, I would escape the summer heat by sitting in the wonderfully cool Capo Giro’s Gelato Artisans café, slowly eating a gelato while reading an article, or a book, or some new resource. It was difficult intellectual work, and could be frustrating, as I would often be more than halfway into an article before realizing that it was too tangential to my research topic for it to be of any use to my mentor. Yet the benefits far outweighed any of the concerns that I might have had from the project. The invaluable research skills that I believe I have gained come from hard work and experience; the knowledge that I have accrued in the course of my studies seems to me not insubstantial, at least as regards my particular topic. I was researching, as the project title might suggest, a political paradigm or model (plebiscite democracy) that had fallen by the wayside in the long march of democratic theory, but that my professor believes might be revived with a healthy dose of Machiavellian realism. Therefore, I began by reading the key texts of Machiavelli, his infamous work The Prince as well as his lesser known but no less impressive semi-historical account the Discourses on Livy. Soon, however, the project took a shift as I found myself increasingly frustrated by Machiavelli. It seemed to me that no democratic theory could be reconciled with Machiavelli’s view that the people never ruled, especially a plebiscite model of democracy. Thus I left Machiavelli behind and, with my professor’s consent, began an in-depth study of Late Republican Rome, with the goal of trying to ascertain how this ancient government incorporated the people into its daily ebb and flow. I was asked to research difficult questions such as, for example, how the contiones, extra-governmental, technically informal meetings operated. Was the common man allowed to speak? How likely was it the average citizen regularly participated? Could the plebeian run for office, or not? During this time, I also, as a side project for my own education at the behest of my professor, undertook to read some of the more important modernist pieces of political literature such as Kant’s short essay What is Enlightenment?, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Benjamin Constant’s essay On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns, as well as Descartes’ Discourse on Method and the lesser known text by William Manning The Key of Liberty. I was very grateful for this opportunity to read and discuss this material, as I can honestly say I feel well prepared for future political theory classes, having spent some time with these texts. After a significant amount of reading about Ancient Rome, I was asked to turn, for the final few weeks, to a new focus: studying how the term “plebeian” was used in contemporary political scholarship. As I began a web of crisscrossing Jstor searches, I was surprised but pleased to discover that articles on Machiavelli consisted of the majority of hits that I was getting. I was even more shocked when I found an article entitled “Machiavellian Democracy: Controlling Elites with Ferocious Populism” by John P. McCormick. After reading this article and considering that I was at this point familiar with Roman history, I could, following the course of the article, disentangle Machiavelli’s theoretical musings from his historical account as given in the Discourses, allowing me a clearer understanding of his ideas, which in turn allowed me to reconsider the plebiscitary model of democracy that my professor is proposing in the light of both the rich history of Rome and the critical eye of Machiavelli, presenting me the perfect opportunity to bring my project neatly to a close. In some detail, what I realized was that the key for the plebiscitary model that draws upon Machiavelli is a model where the people either internally (within the government through a branch such as the tribunes of Ancient Rome) or externally (outside of the government through perhaps an empowered media) patrol the government and the elites who inevitably, because of economic or social prestige, gain enormous political power. This model is therefore ultra-realistic, requiring recognition of a certain class of people in society as elites, and others as, for lack of a better term, plebeians. The people-as-plebeians rule by casting an ever-watchful eye on the dangerous elites: this is the “ferocious populism” McCormick mentions. Questions then arise such as can an organization ever be a part of the government yet be under the complete control of the people? Or can an external organization ever function as a sufficient patrolling organization without being crushed or controlled by the political or economic elites? These are the questions that I began to understand towards the end of my project, and the questions that my professor continues to work on. I hope that my research helps him tackle these difficult issues and that I can be a part of future projects concerning political theory.